K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

Potamus: The way software should be

I like sparse software. I like programs that do one thing. I like applications that don’t try to manage my life or my schedule or my music. I want clean interfaces with straight lines and no rubbish. I don’t want glitz, I don’t want frills, I don’t want glossy album covers fanning out between tunes, all hovering over a mirrored backdrop. And I definitely don’t want one-button clickable interfaces to social networking sites owned my multimedia conglomerates.

Now this is an application I can appreciate. Start. Drag and drop. Play. No more menus or options than is necessary. One button to clear the list, a few more to mimic the same audio playback controls that have been standard since around 1968, and a few audio presets … just so you can’t complain that it’s featureless. :mrgreen:

Source package is a mighty 124Kb, so with a few extra dependencies here and there for the file types you enjoy, it’ll run in a slice of memory about the thickness of your fingernail. I daresay I like this even better than Alsaplayer.

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23 thoughts on “Potamus: The way software should be”

Just tried it, and I must say it’s pretty darn good.
I don’t really go for ultra high-end audio players and extensive playlist capability on my netbook install, and tend to prefer simple apps that take up minimal screen space. Cplay and MOC are probably still my favourite, but Potamus will probably be my preferred GUI music app from now on. Sound quality seems clean enough, and I can just leave the equalization to my headphone amp when I’m using the netbook at home.

Very nice but of no use to me as these days I would never even think about using a music player that did not support scrobbling (sending details of tracks played to social music sites such as Libre.fm or Last.fm) so I guess as a GUI player I’m stuck with terrible bloat that is Audacious.

mpd has a few ways to scrobble like mpdscribble, so something like mpd + mpdscribble + mpc is a lightweight gui-free way to listen to music with scrobbling support. Otherwise sonata is a lightweight gtk mpd client with scrobbling support.

i get the same error on ubuntu with potamus from repositories. i didn’t investigate anymore, but i found that it luanches only with jackd running. i must note, i got rid of pulseaudio long ago. so without jack it doesn’t work, even with aoss.

On my list of prefered applications, Potamus is the only audio player that is graphical. Until I found it, I would exclusively use Music on Console, trying on and off the other little ones which were also mentioned on this site. All others (Rhythmbox et al.) are overkill for my needs.

Alright, this is belated, but I got to install Potamus, and I am worried about you Kmandla. Seriously, Potamus? 12.7MB to download -libqt4, jack and a bunch of other libs? 38.6MB of disk space to be used? Hah? That’s more then Slitaz ISO. Just for a music player. What is going on? You are the guy that tries running Ubuntu on 30MB of RAM and Arch on something like 5. Did I miss the transition? Next thing you know, you are gonna be running Vista on 8GB of RAM and a quadcore. :)

Hmm. Can I ask which system you’re using? The Arch version doesn’t seem to imply qt at all, and even the Ubuntu version doesn’t seem to draw anything that asks for qt. And depending on which types of audio files you use, I could suppose that some of those other libraries could be trimmed out.

That’s Ubuntu Lucid, a minimal installation in virtual box. Just added these to the cli: xorg, gdm, gnome-core, ubuntu-artwork, and then, Potamus.http://www.box.net/shared/n7q40z00if
Other then that, it is a nice app, clean interface and works as expected.

You might try the --without-recommends flag when you install it, and see if the qt packages are left out. If it still tries to install a large number of oddball dependencies, you could try compiling it yourself, or contact the package manager for Potamus and find out why qt is drawn in as a dependency.

As far as I can tell from the home page, Potamus was intended as a GTK2 application. So the addition of qt to your system sounds bizarre, unless one of the other libraries wants it.